Mr. Andreessen has been involved with high level politics for a long time. This is not "random radicalization". I will not comment on the quality of the politics but it feels fairly deliberate.
Just search and you'll find a million articles about his "dark enlightenment" (or whatever stupid name is used) views. I think "Chatham House" was the name of a private group chat he was in that helped this process along, and there are several articles about this.
Chatham house are famous for the rule that if you're invited, you agree that if you talk about what they talked about in their meetings, you must not say who said it.
Most political manipulation of influential people isn't sophisticated at all, it's 3rd grade bullying level. For instance, getting invited to an exclusive meaning as proof of your importance/"seriousness". Brazen flattery, but it works.
And the secrecy grooms them into betraying outsiders in favor of insiders. It's not such a big betrayal to give cover to powerful people's ugly opinions, but it's a start. And once you've done one bad thing with the gang, you're easier to persuade to do worse things with the gang. Again, really banal stuff.
Remember in Snowden's biography, he mentioned being involved in a plot to get some diplomatic person to drunk drive, so they could swoop in and "help" him. That wasn't just targeted at the diplomat. It was also targeted at rookie CIA agent Ed: first do iffy things with us, so that you have firmly rationalized and justified it to yourself once we ask you to do uglier stuff.
This post really reads like a C.S. Lewis novel - the whole fear of being an outsider and laughed at, and the gradual but slippery slope towards more substantial clearly bad stuff.
Chatham House is openly the sort of "inner ring" Lewis warned about.
To get the topic back more on topic for HN, I think that the fear of AI manipulation of the public is misplaced. Not because it can't be a thing, but because private AI-fueled manipulation will be far more destructive. If you fake a video of some horrific crime and post it on the internet, a thousand people will be examining it for mistakes - and a thousand people will claim mistakes which aren't there, and it'll create a lot of noise and certainly that's not a small problem. But if you fake a video and show it to your super-exclusive private circle and explain to them that of course you must not talk about this for the sake of the victims etc. then it's far less likely the mistakes will be spotted. Our leaders can be radicalized by propaganda we're not even allowed to see - that scares me.
He initially supported the Democratic Party but because of crypto and AI he donated millions to super PACs for Trump, supported DOGE and said that children are now being readicalized to hate capitalism as well as directly messaging the Trump administration to put pressure on Universities like NSF, SU and MIT because of DEI or something like that.
One can support a party and then change to not supporting a party for a variety of reasons. Such as disagreeing with the direction the party is going, especially locally, or even as simple as eschewing the previously supported party because you are betting the other one will win and need to curry favor.
I haven't studied Andreessen's views and actions, so I was just positing a strategic reason for a change in political support for a high profile person. (as opposed to a drastic change in their thoughts which is what I take to mean as "radicalized")
For example, I have always preferred most of Democrats' positions on the national level, but on the local/state level, especially in California/Oregon/Washington, I disagree with a lot of the Democrat leaders, more and more since 2010 (I would say my views have not changed much, but the party's priorities at the state and local level have).
Of course, I'm nowhere near as influential as Andreessen nor do I have interests that would warrant a say in national politics, but I can see why if one is against local leadership, they would cozy up to someone who they think can help you fight against them, without being "radicalized", per the above definition.
He’s a “sewer socialist”, his most radical pitch is… making buses free. It’s easy to get outraged by labels but when you strip them away and look at the actual politics it’s all pretty middling. Which is a large part of why he won.
His actual policies aren't that radical to be honest. Yeah the subsidized grocery store idea is one thing, but making busses free or telling hedge fund centibillionaires that it might be a good thing for American capitalism long term if they paid another 2-5 million dollars in tax isn't exactly the workers taking complete ownership of the factories.
For all intents and purposes, he's a milquetoast centrist who wants his city to be a bit better, and thinks it could be a bit better by doing things like making transportation cheaper.
You don't see him advocating for firebombing the NYSE or arresting Met Gala attendees.
And fuck, he's trying. God forbid someone care about their constituents, or their own city. Nope, let's smear him for not kowtowing to a country on the other side of the planet. Eric Adams just wanted to line his own pockets. Bloomberg wanted to line his own pockets. And now we blast a dude who grew up in NYC who just wants to do some really basic things to try to make life a bit better?
They're different economic philosophies, but most Western countries have a mixed system incorporating elements from both. Voting for Momdani doesn't necessarily mean you want total public ownership of the means of production. His manifesto is only moderately more socialist than the status quo.
No, not at all. Socialism is a reaction to extreme capitalism, and basically a call for socialism today is just saying "capitalism is cool and all, but there needs to be some guardrails so capitalism doesn't eat itself".
People voted for the mayor in NYC because capitalism started to eat itself in NYC, and the non-billionaires who actually make up the vast majority of the city wanted a change.
A simple, and reasonably small increase in taxes on the wealthiest of the wealthiest (who are in NYC because its a world class city and their businesses couldn't really "make it" as easily elsewhere) is not socialism. It's saying to the hedge fund billionaires "hey - we don't appreiciate that you're operating your businesses here yet refusing to help pitch in financially in order to keep our world-class city world-class". If Ken Griffin can afford to drop a quarter billion dollars on an apartment he spends ~25 days a year in, or Bill Ackman wants to continue to hire people educated at Colombia and NYU, they can afford to pay another 2-5 million dollars a year in tax".
> the core tenet of Socialism replacing capitalism
You can say Mamdani is a socialist. You can say the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism. But you can't say both. If Mamdani is a socialist, then replacing capitalism is not the core tenet of socialism. If the core tenet of socialism is replacing capitalism, then Mamdani is not a socialist. Those two things do not go together.
I remember a time when entire discussion threads were swiftly culled from HN based on the magnitude of their political content.
These days, it’s pretty clear that the direction matters a lot more than the magnitude, and “flamebait” is only a problem when the flames blow a certain way.
The reason political discussion needs to be limited is exactly for comments like these. Low effort characterizations of mainstream politics as racist or fascist is purely inflammatory, and only going to further turn HN into Reddit but for tech.
extremely anecdotal but whenever I see a racist on Twitter, there's a non-insignificant likelihood that I click on their profile and see Marc Andreesen following them.
It started with an idea to allow users to connect within polygon geofences anywhere on earth. Getting this system to work on Android with all the backend code takes a lot of time. The system itself loads polygon geofences 180° E and W longitude and 90° N and S latitude. And it uses perimeter-based loading system that crosses the antimeridian, equator and north and south poles.
I also built the entire user-based infrastructure from ground up in Java. That includes account settings, sign up, forgot and reset password, and verification codes with multiple settings.
But the framework itself is still more complex, allowing for very stable long-term Android applications. It includes dynamic configurations parsed from the database on the backend and then used on the backend and Android app via the commons library. Dynamic user messages. A full commons REST framework with REST processing that's in the commons library.
Overall it's a large system. And in fact, I'm getting close to publishing it so that users can build their own 100% Java full-stack Android applications: enterpriseandroidfoundation.com
Thanks for your feedback! Appreciated!
This is just a first version we've launched with 4 type of templates only.
It can generate 1-5 slides in one generation.
Basically, the idea is that you describe your story topic and it can generate beautiful "carousel" style slides for you.
We can discuss more in details how we've built and what tech we used if you are interested.
Also, it is planned to add a "brand kit" feature so you configure it once and each time you generate new banners, they stay always matched with your brand
Can you share more? I read his book years ago, but haven't heard/read anything since.
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